by Nick Soulsby
20.0
One More Solo? The Curtain Falls
February to April 1994
The January session was to be the last time Nirvana worked together in studio. While there was only the scantest evidence of artistic activity from Cobain—he was too busy switching homes again—Grohl and Novoselic still presented compositions for Cobain’s perusal as potential material for Nirvana. Even now—as late as January 30, 1994—no one could see that the end to Nirvana was within touching distance. The future was vague, but not preordained. There was no forewarning of the spiraling events that led to Cobain’s death.
ADAM KASPER: I was struck by Grohl’s songs and the demos we made that week. At the time I offhandedly made the remark that he should do a solo album someday … There was talk of the guys wanting a chance to include some of their songs on the new album work. Cobain listened to a few tracks and it seemed he was open to considering other material, but not much time or energy was spent on this.
STEVE DIGGLE: I sat with Dave at the end of the tour and said, “We’re gonna miss you guys, y’know?” because we got on really well on the road—all in [it] together. We were sat at the table and he said he had some songs he wanted to do when he got back. I have to be honest, I thought, I bet they’re pretty good but … the drummer? You’re not sure what he’s got but …
Having spent part of 1993 on a reunion tour with Scream, Grohl joined other musicians in early 1994 for the soundtrack to the film Backbeat.
DON FLEMING: Thurston [Moore] put the lineup together and told Don Was we would do it but only if we could do it without any rehearsal and if we could do it in two days. That helped everyone with their busy schedules; we literally flew out there, learned the songs on the spot one-by-one … There are certain drummers, especially from producing, I’ve worked out are such a key element of the band. They can take a band that are great and make them a step above—that’s what [Dave] did with Nirvana. There were great songs, great front man; the drums took it a step up, and that’s why they were so successful … He brought so much energy to the songs and never fucked up. I don’t remember about where they were at as a band at that point. They’d become very popular but I don’t remember him talking about it at all. I think he was just there to have a good time.
While Cobain was increasingly absent as a creative artist, Nirvana as a performing entity rolled on and arrived in Cascais, Portugal, in February to play their first European shows since 1992. Cobain, Novoselic, Grohl, and Pat Smear had performed these songs so many times that whatever was occurring behind the scenes, their well-drilled onstage chemistry was still there.
STEVE DIGGLE: I remember those shows, standing at the side of the stage, hearing Dave Grohl’s drums and just thinking, Jesus! It’s like John Bonham! This guy can play! Krist was an amazing bass player and Kurt was sometimes quiet but suddenly this roar of a vocal and this intensity. Pat Smear—great guy and great guitarist, he blended in well. It was amazing to see, I’d heard the records but I was blown away by the live thing … I’d heard Bleach and I’d heard the Nevermind album, but the first time I saw their show I thought, Wow, I’ve got it now. Watching Dave Grohl just a few yards away banging the fuck out the drums, Krist to one side, Kurt in the middle belting it out, the intensity rocketing up and down … I saw what it was all about. Kurt was a great guitarist in his idiosyncratic way—using your limitations. A lot of people in punk are like that; it’s not like you’re some virtuoso muso guy, you never got that sense off him, but it was just the right thing—right on the button. It’s the noise, the inflections. I was a big fan of Neil Young and the way he works the noise as well as the notes—that’s passion, feeling, a lot of artistry.
Cobain’s band mates had long since developed immunity to the roller coaster of his moods. For years he swung between spells of shyness, sullenness, or whatever.
STEVE DIGGLE: He was up and down on the tour—one day he’d be quiet, other times he’d be animated. Everyone gets like that on tours—you didn’t detect anything heavy. There’s a bit of video somewhere: I’m walking to the stage, he walks out [of] his dressing room and walks with me all the way to the stage—together. He was such a lovely guy, like they all were. All of them had learned something from punk rock and he’d taken it into this era—and he was true to it. There’s a lot of inspiring things about the heaviness of what he was saying. They weren’t there to be fucking bought. I thought he was sticking to his beliefs—heavy-duty, real things. Maybe dark and intense but real—we couldn’t see where it was ending. As well as Kurt, Dave, Krist—incredible musicians and very thoughtful. Krist is very thoughtful! A big part of that band … There’s the serious side, the intensity—I did get that from the way the band played. It was like thunder coming—but just in the dressing rooms, we knew about this, that we all deal with our own stuff when out on the road. But we did connect in a lot of ways with those guys. I could sympathize with that awkwardness.
Likewise, the drugs had been an issue for over three years now. There was only so long anyone could worry or cushion someone from their own actions. Plus the reality was that Cobain may have been unwell but he wasn’t completely wrecked. One kind soul was sweet enough to share their own drug experience—quite a contrast to Cobain’s private indulgence, which included a cushion of cash, professional minders, and a regular supply.
ANONYMOUS: We got into heroin and started making daily trips up to Seattle to go get it to keep from getting sick. That lasted for a couple years and then [we] … moved to New York … thinking we would get clean there. So, we got an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and found that, Wow! There’s drugs on every street corner! It’s fucking Christmas! So, you can see where that went. It took until 1995 before I got clean and ended up back in Olympia again. Yep, my parents kidnapped me from New York at the age of twenty-seven; humbling, isn’t it? I was pissed, so I showed them and moved back to New York on my own and used for a couple more years, until I ended up temporarily blind from shooting up heroin traced with rat poison. Next thing I knew I woke up in a hospital and they transferred me to the medical rehab portion for a few weeks. Then I decided I didn’t want to live anymore and kept threatening to kill myself, so they transferred me to the Beth Israel psych ward for a month. From there, a friend and my parents chipped in and paid for my rehab in Washington State, so I went directly there from New York. Let’s see … That was my tenth detox and third rehab and hopefully my last.
Regardless of his physical condition, the In Utero tour had commenced in Europe as scheduled on February 4 with a TV appearance in Paris. The band returned to the city two weeks later with Cobain ducking out to visit an old friend.
YOURI LENQUETTE: Kurt often came by my place and he’d spend the afternoon playing the guitar or just sitting on the sofa not saying a word, just being there. Then one afternoon he said, “Youri, I’d like to do a photo session with the band tonight, would you like that? Around seven or eight?” I was like, “Well, Kurt, are you sure?” I didn’t really believe it, but he was positive—I had to ask him because he hated photo sessions. More often than not, rather than me using our relationship to get more out of him, he’d use the fact we had a friendship to avoid them! My assistant was meant to be off work that evening and I told him, “Go, they’re not going to come. He says he is but he’s not going to come.” I didn’t have a makeup artist either because she asked me straight, “Do you think it’ll happen?” When I said no she confirmed she was heading off; she had something else to do that night. I went back home about eight thirty, had dinner, a bit later I got the call telling me, “We’re coming in twenty minutes.” They arrived around ten.
It wasn’t the best time for a photo shoot; Cobain’s face was pockmarked and damaged.
YOURI LENQUETTE: He ended up wearing a lot of makeup because he had things on his skin as a result of his bad health and his bad habits. I told him straight, “It’s going to look really bad.” He agreed but I had to tell him I didn’t have any makeup in the studio. My girlfriend happ
ened to be a mixed-race girl, so he asked, “Can she lend it to me?” So he went into the makeup room, started putting it on without an assistant and, after a while, I go in. He’s looking like Al Jolson! My girlfriend’s skin was a light chocolate color; he has all this makeup made for her skin tone all over his face. I had to say it: “Come on Kurt, it looks ridiculous, we can’t use it.” So, I’m thinking this photo session isn’t going to happen; it’s late, I’ve got no assistant, we’ve got no makeup. I’m thinking it’s best not to do it. Then this guy, who is always avoiding photo sessions even when there was a good reason to have one, he insists, “Don’t you have someone you know who would have some white-skin makeup?” So I remember one friend who was OK to come out even though it was eleven now, [and I said] “Come right now, bring your girlfriend and her makeup.” We just waited for him to arrive. Kurt did the makeup himself and it’s all over the place but it was his idea and basically this whole session was happening because he wanted it. I wasn’t commissioned by anyone except, I’d say, by Kurt himself. I wasn’t ready to do such an important session—I didn’t even have the films I liked to use; I just had to use others I had in the fridge from another shoot. The whole business was done with whatever we had. Artistically it wasn’t my best session even if, looking back, it was the most important session of my career.
Unfortunately, Cobain does resemble a doll in some of the photos.
During this break in Paris, Cobain’s well-honed sense of the pointedly mischievous was on display.
STEVE DIGGLE: He had a gun at the French gig—was pointing it out the window at the journalists. I was up in the dressing room thinking, What’s he doing? Didn’t know if it was a plastic gun or a real gun, to be honest. There was a whole bunch of stairs up to the dressing room at the Zenith—I’d been meeting some friends of mine so I’m milling around where the journalists were and I looked up and thought, Fuck, he’s got a gun up there! He was pointing down at them. I headed upstairs and he was kneeling down by the window. I enjoyed that—it was great, funny.
YOURI LENQUETTE: The thing of holding the gun, playing with it—he brought it with him and it was his idea. Eventually I said, “OK, Kurt, let’s do something else other than the gun.” He’s all like, “OK! So let’s try this, oh, and what if I put this hat like this?” I had this ceremonial hat made with ostrich feathers I bought in Zimbabwe and he’s trying it on. The others were waiting at the back of the photo studio until it was time do some of the whole band together. First it was just three of them because Pat Smear arrived a bit later. We finished around two in the morning, chilled a bit, drank a bit, he saw photos I’d shot in Cambodia in the temples of Angkor—he loved the place. So I said, “Look, Kurt, if you’re so tired, if you’re so fed up with everybody, just have a break. If you like that place I can take you there, we’ll relax, I’ll shoot a few photos of you so that’ll cover expenses and you’ll get to spend two weeks in someplace really different…” He was really into it: “How can we get the visas in the US?” Talking, talking, “Yeah, I’ll call you to organize it when I’m back in the US.” Maybe his last words were “Let’s get organized for the Cambodia trip, great! Wow…” I took them down to their taxi and that was the last time I saw him … In 1994 everyone could see he wasn’t happy. Some things still made him really happy—like having a baby, finding good music that sparked him—but I would still say he wasn’t in the best mental shape. In all areas of life—whether his role as a rock star, his relationship with the band, his drug problems—this was not a happy spell he was enduring. He told me openly, “I’m fed up with everything.” Looking at my photos of the Angkor Wat temple—remember, this was the early ’90s and there were no tourists, you’d maybe see a bus or an adventurous Australian tourist … maybe a few monks but no tourists, nothing—he really liked the place and the fact it was deserted attracted him. He really thought that nobody liked him and that everyone was against him. He was deep into this very negative way of thinking. Plus there were the drugs. I told him to take a break, “You’re huge, take a holiday. You can go away a few months, a few weeks at least—break out of this and when you’ve recovered you can come back fresh.” That’s where the Cambodia idea came in.
Even at this late date, Cobain still spoke of new ideas he might try, whether it was escapes like Cambodia or new techniques he might add to his music.
STEVE DIGGLE: We spent a lot of time walking ’round these big arenas, me and him, and a lot of time on that bus. He told me he really loved the vocal of “Harmony in my Head”—I told him I smoked twenty cigarettes before I sang that to get the roughness in the voice. I said the reason I did that was that I read John Lennon did it before he did “Twist and Shout.” Kurt loved that—said he’d try it out himself; he wanted that gravelly voice. He said that was his favorite song by the Buzzcocks. He was very down-to-earth, a bit of a fan, but we were fans of what he was doing. We went from there. We went through a lot of things like that—he asked me how we survived when we were locked in the tour buses. He said that in the vans from the early days you developed a sense of humor. I told him, “Sense of humor? Listen Kurt, coming from Manchester you grow up with it!” But it does help in those intense atmospheres … We also spoke about that shark that Damien Hirst did; he liked that—mentioned it to me, he seemed very favorable toward it. I was thinking, How does he know about that? I didn’t think he’d be mentioning something like that—I thought we’d be talking about Neil Young more or stuff like that … There was one day we were all staying in the same hotel, waiting for the tour bus, Kurt said, “I wanna go with you guys.” His tour manager said, “No, Kurt, we’ve got to do this an’ that—you’ve got to come with us.” He was insisting he wanted to come with us. That was nice—his heart was in the right place but he had a lot of interviews to do so didn’t come with us in the end. It was a very natural thing with us, all of them, we’d hang out—no awkward moments. But we’d be walking ’round the stadium and there’d be fifty people chasing after him saying he had to do things—he’d say, “Steve, I just wanna walk here with you.” I got what he was saying … Ironically we spoke about guns and stuff like that—not knowing what was to come. Now I put that together with him asking me how we survived and it feels like a profile of what was to come, something building up. But the great thing is we spent all that tour with Nirvana and I liked the record but I was turned on a lot more by them live.
The warm moments rarely lasted; the band was existing in well-catered tedium.
STEVE DIGGLE: You’ve got to remember, big gigs meant hours of hanging around. They had a couple of acoustics in the dressing rooms but that was it. The thing about those stadium gigs is you get a lot of traffic, so you’ve got to get there a bit earlier. You don’t want to be hanging around too long—I like the spontaneity of turning up still feeling fresh, having a drink then getting on a stage—not hanging around for hours in a dressing room staring at the walls … Plus a lot of traveling involved—it wears you down, gets to you. I don’t even know how many sound checks they did … Plus there was all this food and people coming up asking if you wanted to order your meal for after the gig. We went to look at the food for the rider before the show—fucking hell, there was everything! Meal upon meal upon meal—then they’re asking us what we want for dinner! A table the length of a street you could help yourself to all day. On that tour you had to watch yourself—you could just eat all afternoon! Must have put on a couple of pounds on that one! People coming ’round saying they had to take down my meal for afterward but there’s already everything there we could want. It’s par for the course because it’s also for the road crew—there’s a lot of staff—twenty, fifty guys—a lot of people working so needing that food there. You can’t just pop to the shops—not in a stadium. At the front there’s a big car park, at the back there’s a big car park full of tour buses—a lot of people working on those tours.
By March 1, the mood of the tour was at a perilous low as Nirvana strolled through virtually the same ninety-minute
sets they’d played every night for sixty shows over five months and Cobain complained of illness—“bored and old” indeed.
YOURI LENQUETTE: There was some kind of destructive logic in him at the time. He believed the people around him didn’t like him—which totally wasn’t the case! From being on tour with Nirvana, seeing how they acted with him, they were really good people … The fact that he couldn’t connect to these people anymore was a sign of depression … I have good memories of that session—I didn’t feel there was any tension. It was just friends having drinks and shooting photos. It wasn’t tense. But with depression you feel good some moments, then the very next day you’re back to a negative way of thinking—it’s not all one or the other. He didn’t hate them, it wasn’t a conflict, but my impression was he was brooding on this idea that nobody loved him, building up something not based in reality. It was just him; his whole way of seeing things was very dark … He didn’t look well, he was in bad health mainly fueled by the use of drugs.
The tour crossed into Italy and up-and-coming Sicilian favorites Flor de Mal joined the tour.
MARCELLO CUNSOLO, Flor de Mal: We were already huge fans of Nirvana … I had read all about him, about Kurt, I knew almost everything that was known at the time … It turned out Nirvana really appreciated our music, so my recollection is that the most beautiful thing for me was to stand in the same place as Kurt would onstage and to hear them live at such close range, playing just a couple of feet away from me …
It’s a telling point. Cobain had become a media entity. In the early days the band had played to crowds of fellow musicians, often to clusters of friends. Fame had dragged Cobain into the spotlight, isolating him (partly through his own choices) while making him ever more real in the minds of complete strangers—he’d become a modern-day ghost.
